Whisky Van Gogh Go

iBusted

Quiz: Guess what the following links have in common.

• Andy Ihnatko reviews popular e-book readers.
• A recipe for vaca frita.
• An editorial asks why the rich and powerful don’t get grilled in interviews.
• Elle explains how ones sex drive can be influenced by the seasons.
• Apple Insider rumor regarding the iPhone on T-Mobile in America.

If you’re reading this from an iPhone, I bet you figured it out: each one of these links is broken.

When the iPhone debuted nearly three years ago, everyone in the computer industry asked themselves, “What can I do to get on this bandwagon?” The obvious answer for digital publishers was to build iPhone-optimized versions of their websites. After all, though the iPhone had (and arguably still enjoys) the best mobile web experience to date, there were a few obvious shortcomings: a slow Edge wireless network, a slow-ish processor (faster than anything we had seen in-hand, but years behind “actual computers”), and a tiny screen. By offering an optimized site, a content site could offer a superior experience for the end user and enjoy a little sexiness-by-association from the Jesus Phone.

Somehow these efforts were horribly botched, and two years later we’re still suffering them.

These broken links mostly boil down to the websites’ forwarding mechanisms. This is a bit of code that checks the browser and, if it detects an iPhone, forwards to the iPhone-optimized site.

An example: ideally, the Chicago Sun-Times should forward requests for this link…
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/1948278,ihnatko-ebook-nook-kindle-itouch-121909.article
… to this link…
http://mobile.suntimes.com/suntimes/db_21515/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=n1FQlXBo&src=cat ¹
Instead, the Sun-Times is forwarding every page request to http://mobile.suntimes.com/ (the root “home page” of the optimized site), thus breaking every external link to every single article they’ve published. This is the very definition of a broken website.

Predictably, most of the culprits are media companies who have their roots in print. Scores of newspaper and magazine sites are iBusted. I’ve also found a handful of “new media” sites that also suffer this problem, but they’re mostly idiocy like collegehumor.com. Oh, and Salon. I expected better of you, Salon. AppleInsider, you have no excuse at all.

Three solutions:

1. Fix your “mobile version.” Repair your htaccess redirect to get deep links working correctly. (Also keep in mind that by even having an iPhone-specific site you have sort of doubled the sheer amount of Website that you’re obliged to maintain.)
2. Remember mobile stylesheets?
3. Is an iPhone-optimized site even necessary? iPhones and their competikin have gotten wildly faster, and most third-generation handhelds are on snappier 3G networks. And as Ithako (ironically) states in the above article, “it’s better to be good than to be innovative.”

¹ bonus silliness: I wasn’t even able to find this article via the Sun-Times iPhone site’s built-in search engine; had to dig around through a maze of categories and screens just to get this link.

New Rule: Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is only allowed to receive first-gen antibiotics.

bitched:

crookedindifference:

(via ronbailey)

Garfield Minus Garfield: dick jokes!

why ChromeOS is a great idea

1. Windows XP needs to die.
2. Vista and Win 7 are bloated too bloated for the thin-and-light laptops that most consumers want.
3. All of the above — and even OS X — are over-featured for these same machines.
4. Do I even need to poke fun at desktop Linux?
5. In fact, as far as I can tell the “desktop OS” is basically a failure. Outside of computer professionals and “graphic designers,” most people just want to start their web browser. They can barely use the rest of their operating system past that — and they don’t want or need to, either.
6. So building computers that are designed to do one thing, run a web browser, incredibly, and do it insanely well, is a great idea.

An example of “desktop OS” as failure: one of the fundamental conceits is that the screen would be a “desktop” upon which users could arrange documents represented in “windows.” Have you ever noticed that, regardless or screen size or resolution, most people run their browsers full screen? And iTunes! Fullscreen iTunes, like a damned spreadsheet for your music… I don’t get it, but I’m clearly the minority. Even apps like Photoshop are drifting toward full-screen apps with tabbing interfaces.

The Windows metaphor works great for for me and maybe you, but for most folks they’re just an unnecessary mess.

my prediction: the desktop OS : ChromeOS : 2010 :: IE6 : Firefox : 2006. Just referring to adoption among a particular class of users, mind you. There’s no one solution for everybody.

imagine Khalid in an iron Hannibal mask

The notion that 9/11 conspirators are too dangerous to be tried in American courts has been driving me crazy for years.

Am I really supposed to believe that prisons secure enough for American serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer are not up to the task? (Read the Wikipedia entry, the murders were way, way more gristly than I thought.) Who presents a greater risk upon escaping, a native American who could seamlessly blend in to the population, or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Do inmates in maximum security prisons regularly escape, or does that only happen in Arizona, or in Rep. Shadegg’s imagination?

The worst part is, I simply have no idea if people like Shadegg are commanded by partisanship or actual cowardice, and which bodes worse for our culture.

[update] Gruber next-leveled it

death by lashing with USB cords

On the list of problems with the App Store process, the “trademarks, logos or service marks belonging to Apple” restriction (which prohibits an icon of an iPhone to indicate syncing, amongst other things) ranks somewhat low, but it is a bit of a thorn in the design process, and the inconsistent application of the restriction frankly feels strangely insulting (e.g. it’s not enough that George Lucas is the richest guy on Endor, but he also gets special treatment from Cupertino?).

I understand the argument that Apple must protect their trademarks. But rather than fight this corporate tradition, can’t it be embraced? Imagine if this simple form were added to the Application Submission process:

1. Does this application use any Apple trademarks, logos or service marks? [yes]
2. List each use and their function:
   1. An icon of an Apple iPhone in the Nav Bar, to indicate syncing ones iPhone to a server.
   2. An icon of an Apple iMac in the Nav Bar, to indicate syncing the application to a desktop computer.
   3. A photo of an Apple iPhone in the Help screen, to instruct the user on use of the application.

…and then as part of the Application Approval, a document that reads: “Apple licenses the use of these Apple trademarks [a, b, c] for the specific use of [1, 2, 3]. Use of Apple trademarks beyond these highly incredibly specific uses will result in the termination of 1 (one) member of your family per violation, by means to be determined by Apple Corporation.” Tack on a token fee for the legal paperwork.

Sparklines!

Working on Svpply has been absurdly rewarding. On top of being a great codebase, I can sit around watching the “output” from the users for hours. (I wonder if that’s what working on Tumblr is like?)

What nobody else gets to see are all the silly tools and reports that I’ve built for internal use. Sparklines, people! Everyone should be using sparklines!

(Here’s an invite link, thanks for reading: http://svp.ly/r/pa95fj7e enjoy Doug!)

URL shorteners in print?

Speaking of URL shorteners, I was just reading the latest Dan Savage column and noticed that he used a “tiny URL” to point to a blog post by Nate Silver.

Now granted, I was reading this online instead of in print, but I assume the tiny URL made it to the print version of his column — and thus realized that URL shorteners solve a gigantic problem for print media. A url like http://somecrazyurl/linkto/somearticle/at_this_site?articleId=whothefuckknows&somethingOrOther doesn’t translate to hyphenated newsprint terribly well, which in turn makes mentioning a specific web page (as opposed to a mere site) — and modern accurate attribution — an utter bitch.

URL shorteners are controversial. But up until this point, the issue has mostly been pivoting around the popularity of Twitter; Twitter is why URL shorteners exist, and their inability to do anything about the issue (like a built-in feature for exempting long URLs from the Twitter character limit) is why they persist. But if mainstream media like The New York Times start rolling out URL shorteners (ex. http://nyt.ly/123)… hm. Well, I dunno. From the perspective of a newspaper copy editor, I imagine it would be a godsend.